Mars Exploration Programs

NASA's Mars Exploration Program is a multi-decade portfolio of robotic orbiters, landers and rovers — Curiosity (still operational since August 2012), Perseverance (with Ingenuity helicopter, Feb 2021), MAVEN, MRO and Mars Odyssey — plus the embattled $11B+ Mars Sample Return campaign currently under architectural restructure following a 2023 Independent Review Board finding that the planned mission would cost $8-11B and slip to 2040 [1][2][3][4]. The program sustains roughly $600-800M/year in NASA Science Mission Directorate spending and underpins multi-decade contracts at Lockheed Martin (rover descent stages), Aerojet Rocketdyne (RS-25-class propulsion via L3Harris), Maxar (instruments), and JPL/Caltech (integration) [5][6][7].

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ExoMars is ESA's flagship Mars astrobiology programme, anchored by the Rosalind Franklin rover targeting a two-metre subsurface drill — the first instrument ever flown to Mars capable of accessing depths where ancient biosignatures may be preserved from radiation damage [1][2]. Originally a joint ESA-Roscosmos mission, the rover was unwound from Russia in March 2022 in response to the invasion of Ukraine and re-baselined under a Europeanised architecture with a new ESA-built landing platform, NASA contributions, and launch no earlier than 2028 on a commercial U.S. launcher, with arrival at Oxia Planum in 2030 [3][4][5].

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Tianwen (天问, 'Questions to Heaven') is China's Mars exploration programme — Tianwen-1 (launched July 23, 2020, arrived Mars orbit February 10, 2021) made China the second nation to successfully soft-land and operate a rover (Zhurong) on Mars in May 2021, and the planned Tianwen-3 sample-return mission (NET 2028) targets first return of Mars samples to Earth, potentially ahead of NASA's reformulated Mars Sample Return programme [1][2][3]. Executed by CAST and CALT under CASC, with no listed pure-play exposure and a credible chance of beating NASA / ESA to a Mars sample-return first [4].

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The UAE's Emirates Mars Mission (EMM, 'Hope' probe / Al-Amal) made the United Arab Emirates the first Arab nation to reach Mars when it entered orbit on February 9, 2021 — at a total programme cost reported in the region of $200M [1][2]. The follow-on Emirates Mission to the Asteroid Belt (EMA) — announced in October 2021 — is a far more ambitious 7-year, 5-billion-kilometre cruise to seven main-belt asteroids culminating in a 2034 rendezvous and landing on (269) Justitia, targeting a late-2028 launch on a commercial U.S. launcher [3][4]. Both missions are executed by the Mohammed Bin Rashid Space Centre (MBRSC) in collaboration with the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics (LASP) at the University of Colorado Boulder, anchoring an Emirati deep-space industrial and knowledge-transfer capability [1][3].

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